Never ever seen the webproxy portlet to work, in any version

[Ashley Pietersen, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Hi,

Please note: I am not programmer and just a light-user of Liferay CE, now on version 7 / MySql/ Apache/Tomcat bundle.
In all the cases when I used Liferay over the past years I have tried to insert a page(s) from another web platform. (now, inserting a dashboard(s) from Splunk)

Unfortunately, and until now, I never had any success to get this specific portlet working. I have found on this forum many posts about all kind of issues around this portlet but I never could it make it work for me.

(simple iframes does not work anymore because of the security restrictions on most web platforms we like to insert, unfortunately)
And neither did I find any simple (and working) example of this webproxy portlet how to use it, just as starting point.

I am really wondering why this portlet is out here in Liferay. Does it really work at all, out of the box? If so, with what url and with what settings?
Can anybody help me with a simple example and maybe some tips for this portlet (in v7), without the need of deep java skills or any other deep Apache Tomcat knowledge?

Besides: this is the most often seen result in v7 sofar: Web Proxy is temporarily unavailable. (also no clue why, but that is another issue I suppose)

Kind regards
Ashley Pietersen

[David H Nebinger, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Yes, the web proxy portlet works, but likely not in the way you have wanted or needed.

Web proxy for the most part is to encapsulate a public view from another server within your browser page.

As soon as you want to get fancy with login passthrough, JS spa app proxy, ssl/non-ssl bridging, etc is when you start having issues. And really, it is because of the complexities of the implementation details.

For example, let's take the case where you are trying to proxy a site that you have to log into. Now say you're lucky and your Liferay credentials match those of the system to proxy to. Normally, if you log into a site you get a login cookie or something that you pass on every request to show that you've authenticated.

Now, as a proxy, if the server logs in, it gets the cookie back from the remote system and has to hold onto it. So you might store this as a session var on the server side, but if you're not configured to use sticky sessions in a cluster w/o session replication, your next browser request can go to a different server that wouldn't have the cookie and the proxy will not display what you'd expect.

There's many other ways to foul up some of these complicated scenarios, but they all boil down to the same issue: it is tough to proxy web requests through another.

Besides: this is the most often seen result in v7 sofar: Web Proxy is temporarily unavailable. (also no clue why, but that is another issue I suppose)

There should be messages in the logs which tell you why web proxy portlet failed.






Come meet me at the 2017 LSNA!

[Ashley Pietersen, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Hi David,
Thank you for your detailed explanation. I can follow the essence of your answer. And I believe you if you say that there are many scenario’s where it can fail.
1) So maybe the web proxy portlet is not the right solution for what I try to achieve. Although it would be a very powerful feature in Liferay if it works. What I think I need is a kind of reverse proxy that keeps the session and content in a cache, or something like that. Do you have any suggestion?

2) I have looked in many logs and the only that refers to the web portlet is the error.log and that says:

[Sun Apr 30 16:10:12.950704 2017] [proxy_ajp:error] [pid 1640:tid 1032] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 172.24.17.163:49244] AH00878: read response failed from [::1]:8009 (localhost)
Unfortunately it does not say me very much. Where does port 8009 coming from in this respect?

Nonetheless thanks for your response sofar and if you have further suggestions and directions please let me know. Because as said this would be a power feature for me if I can get it to work.
Kind regards
Ashley Pietersen

[David H Nebinger, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Ashley Pietersen:

[Sun Apr 30 16:10:12.950704 2017] [proxy_ajp:error] [pid 1640:tid 1032] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 172.24.17.163:49244] AH00878: read response failed from [::1]:8009 (localhost)
Unfortunately it does not say me very much. Where does port 8009 coming from in this respect?

8009 is the AJP connector, so it looks like there is a timeout trying to get the result from the remote server to proxy back but it's not occurring in time.

That's yet another issue w/ proxying, you'd have to ramp up timeout in the middle tier to accommodate how long it takes to get value from back end, process it in Liferay and feed the result back to the front end.

Reverse proxy support can also be hard to handle, especially in the cluster.

Honestly for what you're going after I'd try to stick with the iframe portlet. Takes Liferay out of the middle.







Come meet me at the 2017 LSNA!

[Ashley Pietersen, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Hi David,

Thanks again. So I really need to reconsider my approach. Allthough I have not yet a clue in what direction to look.

nb. iframe is unfortunately not an option because it does not allow to show content in an iframe by the remote webserver. Or is there a work around for this?

Kind regards
Ashley Pietersen

[Jason Miller, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Hi Ashley, did you have any luck solving this problem? I'm having the same issue with the web proxy portlet failing by default, saying "Web Proxy is temporarily unavailable".

[Ashley Pietersen, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Hi Jason, No, sorry, unfortunately I never could solve this strange behavour of this tandard widget. Little bit dissapointed.
regards
Ashley Pietersen

[Jason Miller, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

It seems to be fixed in 7.0-ga4.

[Ashley Pietersen, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

I will test it when I have upgraded our instance. Hope so!